


End Game

by runsinthefamily



Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Character Death, no more pointless Mary Sue fuckery, non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-01
Updated: 2011-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:11:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I used to love the Anita Blake series, right up until <i>Narcissus in Chains.</i> Edward and Anita's relationship was one of the best things in the books, I always thought, and I couldn't imagine that he would have been alright with what she turned into.  This is my little self-indulgent wish for how things should have ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	End Game

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Финал](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212546) by [Helga Winter (hwinter)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hwinter/pseuds/Helga%20Winter)



The arduer was rising again – he could see it in her eyes, in the way she stretched, languorous and slow, across the sofa. Nathaniel, Micah, and Richard already sprawled, helpless on the floor, loved nearly to death. Jean Claude still crouched in the corner, eyes shiny and stupid with fear, moaning, “No more, no more!” The red-shirted bodyguards had cut and run. The vampires were all sucked dry, withered and rigid in various piles that gleamed with still wet blood.

There was no one left but him.

“Ed-ward,” she purred. Her normally curly hair was now a matted mess of tangles. Her naked body shone with sweat and semen. Her fevered eyes focused on his groin. “Come on, Edward. You must be at least curious. The ardeur,” she shuddered and ran a hand down her body, as if the very sound of the word were pleasurable. “It wants you,” she whispered.

“I don’t fuck monsters,” he said, and shot her between the eyes.

Or tried to. Christ she was fast now. She blurred off the sofa almost as fast as a vampire could have managed it and his shot went into the padded arm. He went left immediately and felt rather than saw her leap miss him by inches. She left a scent trail, musk and heat and that vague vanilla smell she always seemed to have these days. Despite himself, he was stirred. Bile rose in his throat.

He hit the floor and rolled, reached out and caught a handful of thick auburn braid. The young wereleopard hardly made a noise as Edward turned, jamming the muzzle of the gun up under the delicate line of his jaw.

And she was _right there_ , frozen in her scramble across the carpet no more than a foot away. It should have thrilled him, this struggle, this final answering to the question he’d been asking himself for years – who was better, the teacher or the pupil? She was the best he’d ever helped to train, the fastest and the most deadly practical when the chips were down, and he’d longed for years to test her, even as their growing friendship held him back. So few people in the world who knew him for who he really was, so few that truly understood him … He looked in her wide brown eyes and saw there all the answers he’d ever hoped for. It didn’t matter who was better anymore. They’d gone beyond that.

“Edward,” she said.

He shuddered. “Stop with the whammy or I’ll put a silver bullet in his brain. Whatever power you’re siphoning from your _harem_ , you aren’t fast enough to stop that.” His voice was flat and firm, betraying nothing of the unaccustomed conflict inside.

She didn’t move. He remembered the times he’d stood by her side, the weapons he always left her, watching her grow stronger each time they’d met, her small stature hiding a purpose and determination to rival his own. No, to compliment his own. Soul mates, he’d said in New Mexico, and it was true, it was true …

“I said stop it,” he said, and shoved the gun into the wereleopard until the boy grunted in sleepy, confused pain.

Her eyes narrowed and she drew back, slowly, carefully.

“Stalemate, Edward?” she asked. “Not like you, hostages. Didn’t you bring a flamethrower this time?” She smiled. God, she was beautiful. He’d preferred it when she’d just been pretty.

“You know how this ends,” he told her.

“Yes,” she responded. “I wonder if you do.” She tilted her head to one side, drawing in a breath. Around them, every supine body shuddered, even the vampires, even the ones he had been sure had to be dead. The air thickened, cloying in the back of his throat. Her eyes were huge, pupils dilated until the barest ring of brown remained.

“You know nothing,” she whispered.

The stirring he’d felt before had been nothing compared to this. Lust roared over him like a tidal wave, driving reason away. His fingers slackened on the gun and it fell away with a thump to the carpet. Nathaniel slithered down off his thighs as he rose to his knees, reaching out to her.   
“No,” he said, voice still calm, still under control. He fell to hands and knees, fighting. “No, goddammit.”

“Edward,” she said. Under the sultry whore’s tones he could hear the young woman he’d pulled from that vampire’s den, collarbone shattered, left arm mangled, laughing in harsh gasps because she refused to cry, refused. A hand touched his back, smooth cool fingers glided up his neck, into his hair.

He laughed, harshly. Her knees were in front of him now. He had only to look up to see the rest of her, naked as Eve, gorgeous and willing.

“Stop this, Anita,” he said to the carpet.

“Make me,” she said, seized him by the throat and flipped him over onto his back. She straddled him brazenly. “Make me, Edward. Why don’t you make me do what you want? What you’ve always wanted.” She bent forward, breasts dragging through the damp stain on his shirt, and bit him under the ear, gently.   
The arduer twisted around him, seeking a way in, but he’d sealed himself away now. Years of iron discipline in a school that she, for all her crazy, violent experiences, still could not imagine kept him safe. Inside his head, at any rate. He assessed his body dispassionately and knew that if it was just fucking she wanted, she was going to get it.

She was tearing at his clothing now, ripping his tshirt open across his chest. The blood soaking the front was smeared across her breasts and belly like the ideograms of some ancient, primal language. Her fingers smeared blood down his sides. She leaned down and licked it from his left nipple, which tightened under her tongue.

Jesus. Jesus, she was good. She dragged her lips up his body to his neck, to his ear.

“Does she do this for you, the little woman back in Sante Fe?” she asked him, clenching her thighs. “Does she know what you want, what you really need?” Her fingernails dug into his ribs. He could feel them break the skin. “Does she know who you are inside?” Anita laughed low in her throat. “Sex is just a function, like any other, right? A biological need. You fuck like you eat, fueling the machine, keeping it,” she pulled, and snapped his belt like it was thread, “well oiled.”

“Get off me,” he said but he couldn’t make his hands do what he wanted. They betrayed him, settling on her hips, clutching her velvet skin.

“Give in,” she whispered. “I know what you want. I can make it happen, all of it, every single thing. And when it was done …” She sat up, candlelight spilling across the slopes of her breasts, caressing the cup of her navel. “I could give you peace, Edward.” Her face was like that of a madonna, serene and kind. Her eyes were bottomless, fathomless wells. She was an icon, a goddess. She opened her arms to him.

In one motion, he rolled them, pressing her into the soiled carpet beneath them. “What I want? Everything I want? All night long, is that it? You’ll be my whore, you’ll be my mother. You’ll mend my heart and make me whole and fill up that dead space behind my eyes and when it’s done I can stay by you forever.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

She was pliant now, yielding. He was losing it, losing his control.

“It’s a lie,” he said. His voice trembled. He rose up on his elbows, tried to brace himself up, hold himself away from her.

“I have never lied to you,” she whispered. “Don’t you know that? You are the other half of my – “

He kissed her, half because he had to, half to keep her from saying it. He ground against her, feeling red mad lust creeping its way into his brain. This is what caring did. It opened a door and it was nearly impossible to close it again. Why had he thought he could come in here and kill her? He was broken, flawed. Nearly twenty years of harsh, unyielding discipline, undone.

He could hear his breath, gasping, nearly sobbing. She was cooing under him, arms and legs wrapped around him. Christ, he was naked. How had that happened? She slid against him like a serpent and he was abruptly there, feeling his cock press against the slick, open heat of her. Her eyes, wide and delirious with triumph. Her mouth, open.

 _No._

He pulled away, feeling like he was pulling off his own arm. His teeth were clamped together so tightly that his jaw cramped and somewhere inside his head there was screaming. She looked confused and then pissed. For moment she looked almost like herself again, her brows drawing down, her lips set into that straight line. Anita, angry with him for holding out on her yet again.

He reared up onto his knees and then fell backward, away from her, hands scrabbling at the floor. A laugh stuttered out of him and he knew that he was on the edge of hysteria. Monsters had nearly killed him before but he’d never surrendered his _mind_ …

“Edward,” she said. “Don’t go.”

What were his options? Think goddammit and not about her skin, not about her lips and her neck and her silky thighs. A death blow. Anything less and she’d probably heal. God only knew what she was capable of right now. The heart or the head, like a vampire, probably safest. No guns left, no explosives, nothing but his hands. Had to get in close. Close enough to touch, to kiss, to – no!

“Edward, please. I need you.”

Her long back knife lay on the floor. Five feet away. It might as well have been a mile. He needed time, he needed to make her wake up.

“Like Nikolaos needed you? Like Seraphine needed you? Or Belle Morte, or Marme Noir?”

She paused in the act of reaching out and her brows knit.

“It’s not what you are that makes you a monster. It’s what you do. And once you’ve done those things, no one can undo them, Anita. Not even you.” His voice cracked on the last word.

Anita blinked and then looked away, looked around the room. Her breath went out in a little gasp as her gaze fell on Micah, lying a few feet away, still and bloody. “No. I – no, this isn’t right, this isn’t …” She crawled away, took the wereleopard’s head into her lap, brushing his hair back from his face.

The red fog in his head receded. Cautiously, slowly, he edged to the side and laid his hand on the knife hilt.

She was weeping, bent over her lover. He felt hope then, some faint beginnings of it anyway. Could she come out of it? Could she come back? If there was any chance of saving her, he had to take it.

Her small fists clenched. “I’ll make it right,” she whispered. “I can make it right.” She laid Micah down, got to her feet.

“Anita,” said Edward. “Let me help you. We’ll call that witch out in Tennessee, get her to do something.”

“It won’t hurt,” she said and then turned toward him again. Her eyes had gone black, edge to edge. In their depths, stars twinkled coldly. “It won’t hurt, and afterward you won’t mind.”

He got to his feet as she came at him in a predatory stalk. He kept the knife behind him. “Wait. Anita.”

“Shhh,” she soothed. “Just trust me. I can fix everything, I can make it better, just trust me.”

His back hit the wall. Her hands closed on his face, fingers and palms cold as ice, cold as death. He could feel it leaching the warmth out of him. Her eyes were endless.

“I’m sorry,” he managed. “I came here to save you.”

“You have,” she said and smiled.

“I have,” he agreed and put the knife in under her ribs.

Her eyes went wide and the night in them blinked out like a snuffed candle flame. He twisted and she let out a choked sound. He knew that sound, he’d heard it a hundred times before. He caught her as she crumpled, cradled her head as he went to his knees. Blood ran over his hands. Nothing new.

Her eyes were brown again. “Shit,” she said, and coughed blood. “You killed me, Edward.”

“I saved you,” he said and, like she’d done for Micah, smoothed the hair out of her eyes.

“I always knew,” she said, forcing the words out. “You were … better than … me …”

“I guess so.” He was a wasteland inside, a desert. She was still trying to talk and he leaned over, ear to her mouth.

“ _Promise … N’Mexico … head …_ ”

“I remember,” he said. As smoothly as he could, as quickly, he drew the knife out, brought it up, brought it down. Took her head off. Did it clean.

Like she would have done for him.


End file.
